ALL our political parties contain a few members who are fanatics or obnoxious or crazy, and in some cases a combination of all three, but the Labour party seems to have a plague of these types at the moment.

I have come to feel some sympathy with decent, honest, law-abiding and patriotic Labour party members – of whom there are many – for what they have to suffer at the hands of characters such as Ken Livingston, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell.

Livingston has been appointed by Jeremy Corbyn as co-convenor of Labour’s defence review committee – which is like putting Satan in charge of the pearly gates. Livingston is noted for his sympathy for the IRA which he followed up last week on Question Time by blaming Tony Blair for the London bombings on 7/7. That’s par for the course with Ken and I suppose we’re used to it. When he found himself in disagreement with his colleague Kevan Jones the other week, he declared that Mr Jones “needs psychiatric help.” That is a pretty loathsome remark, even by Ken’s standards. Ordered to apologise by Comrade Corbyn, Ken did apologise, only subsequently to appear to apologise for his apology.

And now Diane Abbott is back on the Labour front bench. This is the lady who described her Labour colleagues’ sending their children to private schools as “intellectually incoherent and indefensible” – and then sent her son to the private City of London School. Then she failed to declare payments from the BBC amounting to £17,300 and was obliged to apologise to the House. She went on to remark, “The British invented racism.”

And then there is the phenomenon of John McDonnell, shadow chancellor, who once said,

“It's about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA."

Last week McDonnell surpassed his support for the murderous IRA by quoting in the House of Commons the biggest mass murderer of them all, Chairman Mao Tse Tung. For dramatic effect he brandished a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. He claimed he was joking. It’s revealing to notice that he subsequently deleted this episode from his official You Tube page. Hitler murdered six million Jews but Mao slaughtered or starved to death seventy million of his own people. Imagine the outcry if someone waved a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the House and then said it was only a joke.

Finally, there’s the daddy of them all, the leader Jeremy Corbyn. He is always good for a smile, a whistle and a logical inconsistency. This is the man who claims his creed is democracy and says his party’s policy decisions must be decided by the Labour conference. Well, what’s left to be said when the majority of conference is in favour of our nuclear deterrent but the party leader says he would never push the button? When is a deterrent not a deterrent? When you tell the enemy that of course you’ll never use it.

So what will happen next, given all these crazies on the Labour front bench? It is inconceivable that a social democratic party, which for a century has contributed much to the life of our nation, will allow itself to be destroyed by these extreme ideologues. They will ditch Corbyn and his crazies. Sooner rather than later, please – for the sake of the country.